Made Possible By

From 1908, a view of lower Manhattan from the relatively bucolic shore of Governors Island:

The tallest structure is the just-completed Singer Building, with all the other 20-to-30-story towers forming an almost solid mass. The schooner off to the left – almost certainly a working ship rather than an older version of the tourist schooners around today – provides some nice visual counterpoint.

The title is what makes this worthwhile: The City of Skyscrapers / Made possible by the development of the / Otis Elevator. Advertising is what it is, and it’s not really worth going into the specifics of the claim. Fair to say, Otis was not the only company that innovated in elevator design and while elevators were a necessary technology for tall buildings, Otis elevators were probably not.

By 1908, people had been talking about the new tall buildings for more than thirty years, about twenty of them under the name “skyscraper.” That’s long enough for a new technology to become part of the landscape, and for a large corporation to want to use the reflected opinion to boost its image.